How long have I been playing WoW?

In the beginning…

I started playing World of Warcraft sometime around October 2006. I would have had to of been 10 years old at the time. I remember my older brother coming home one day with a new game for the computer. He finished installing it and played it, I came up to him, interested in the game. Everything about it seemed magical, I had never seen a game like it before. I just sat there with him, watching my brother play the night elf hunter he had created, adventuring through the beautiful Teldrassil.

I asked him if I could play too, when he was done. He agreed and the next day he logged me into his trial account I created a Human Paladin. Immediately I realized how lost in this world I was, having never played an RPG before I didn’t know what quests where, I didn’t go off adventuring I just looked around and asked my brother what to do until I got an understand of where to go and what to do. When his trial account ended, we made a new account when my brother bought the game. Together we made new characters – he made another hunter and I made a warlock.

After a few weeks, our mum started to notice we were playing the game an awful lot. So to keep check on us and make sure we were playing in a safe online environment, she created her character and started playing as well.

…well, to make a long story short…

Eventually, my brother stopped playing WoW as he got older, though my mum and I still play and have been raiding together since Wrath of the Lich King. During our time playing WoW, my mum has had a heart attack, I came out as gay (to our guild as well), my mum and I have made a bunch of friends online in our guild and have even met some of them in real life as well. On top of that I have also just finished my final year at school – and I got the legendary cloak the same day as my graduation assembly.

I am not a social person – I like calm and quiet surroundings and I tend to not talk to people much – however, I am nowhere near as anti-social as I used to be, mostly because through the social aspect of WoW and raiding with my guild I have created a lot of my social skills. Without the friendly chatting and banter during raids and the casual conversations in guild chat, I don’t know what I would be like today. Having that environment in WoW where there were people I could chat with and hang out with really helped my issues with socializing.

I was also bullied in my early years of high school and WoW became a safe haven for me. It was my escape from reality when I could not handle reality anymore. If I felt really horrible or depressed, playing WoW distracted me from the real world and gave me the ability to be happy. And now, my escape has turned into my passion, I am a proud nerd and gamer.

I would have to say that is possibly one of the best things to have happened to me in my life (so far).

4 responses to “How long have I been playing WoW?”

Remembering back when I first started playing, it was so magical wasn’t it! My first memory was playing my Blood Elf Priest and killing the mana wyrms. I was so scared I would die, mainly because I had played RuneScape where death meant losing my stuff! However, admitting that I was 18 at the time and this was around June 2007, I feel as though I was acting like a kid in a candy shop with the game! I still love it to pieces now I am in my mid 20’s! 😛 It’s great how WoW is a release where you can almost disappear in for a while, where everything is brilliant and nothing is wrong – and really, if this helped you escape from bullying and depression and helped you reach the other side happier, then that’s a fantastic thing 🙂